Mobile-Search and Advertisement-Cache Architecture

This team set out to improve the mobile search user experience by caching popular search results on mobile devices. First, they create a community-based cache by mining the most popular queries in mobile search logs. Then, over time, the cache was personalized by adding new user search queries. Despite this, after analyzing four months of mobile search logs, the group discovered that on average, 66 percent of the search queries submitted by a user can be answered by caching 2,500 links on a 1MB cache. This translates to a prototype implementation on Windows Mobile that responds 16 times faster and that is 23 times more energy-efficient compared to querying over a 3G connection. Furthermore, the prototype also demonstrates how the caching architecture can enable monetization of mobile local search without hurting the mobile user experience. A rich set of ads is first cached on the phone and since they are locally stored, finding and displaying a mobile local ad is extremely fast (it can show up while a query is still being typed).

OneAlbum—Find Your Photos in your Friends' Albums

If you have photo albums online today, they typically only contain photos you have taken, despite the fact many photos in other people's albums are relevant to you as they are pictures of you or others close to you. This team developed OneAlbum, which automatically finds relevant photos in your friends' albums on social networks or in shared albums, and shows them side-by-side with the photos you have taken. That means that if you attended an event and took pictures, you'll be able to see all photos that you took and those your friends took. OneAlbum uses an unsupervised face-recognition algorithm to analyze the photos in your album and automatically find the faces of people you care about, based on frequency of their appearance, and also combines social-network graph and other information. In other words, tagging is not required. The algorithm was tested on real large-scale albums including tens of thousands of photos and achieved accuracy rates as high as 90 percent.

Cloud Faster

Cloud computing's main problem, according to this group, is making applications run substantially faster, both over the Internet and within data centers. Their measurements of real applications show that today's protocols fall short, leading to slow page-load times across the Internet and congestion collapses inside the data center. After collaborating with the Bing team and the Windows Core Operating System Networking, they came up with a new suite of architectures and protocols that boost performance and the robustness of communications to overcome these problems, backed up by real measurements and a new theory describing protocol dynamics that remedy fundamental problems in TCP. Their demo showed the experience users will have with Bing with the new improvements as well as visualizations of intra-data-center communication problems and how their changes fix them.

Greening Corporate Networks with Sleep Proxy

This group noticed that most desktops are always on in a corporate network, even when they are not in use for extended periods (like at night), and this is bad for the environment as well as the company's bottom line. While Windows 7 provides aggressive sleep functionality, many users override it because they occasionally might want to access their machine remotely. Thus, the team built a system where a desktop goes to sleep when not in use but can still awaken seamlessly when the user tries to access it. The system, which consists of a sleep server that maintains the network presence of the sleeping machine, does not require special hardware or changes to existing software. In fact, the solution is operational on Microsoft's campus in Building 99 and has reportedly resulted in substantial savings in terms of money, power consumption, and carbon-dioxide emissions.

In this case, the group wrote an application for the Microsoft Surface which tackles the issue of family archiving and presents a system designed to enable families to capture, manage, create, and store new kinds of digital memorabilia. It lets families easily upload photos and videos, as well as scan in physical memorabilia, such as children's artwork or a child's first pair of shoes. Families can view this content in many flexible ways and can also create new kinds of digital objects (multimedia scrapbooks and even a digital piñata). Finally, the team finished up by showing how the system would fit into a larger ecosystem of devices in the home and how it links to new kinds of media displays.

Scientific applications have diverse data and computation needs that scale from desktop to supercomputers, especially if you consider that these resource requirements change based on the application, the domain, as the collaboration and the data collections expand, or when seasonal campaigns are undertaken. Cloud computing can solve this problem via a scalable, economic, on-demand model but it needs some work when specifying into the realm of science. This group presented a suite of science applications that leverage the capabilities of Microsoft's Azure cloud-computing platform with tools and patterns developed specifically to use the cloud effectively for solving problems in genomics, environmental science, and oceanography, covering both data and compute-intensive applications.

Closing Thoughts

Looking over the above list, it's clear that the recession not only hit Microsoft hard, but it affected the company's research branch as well. Make no mistake: less than half the number of projects as last year is no coincidence. Nevertheless, Microsoft corporate's influence on Microsoft Research is still very noticeable: the focus this year was undoubtedly on Natural User Interfaces (NUIs) and cloud computing, both topics which many Microsoft executives have been emphasizing. What captivated your attention this year?